When San Diego Fire Chief Jeff Bowman retired in 2006, he had one thing on the brain: wine. Making it, drinking it, but above all, growing those juicy grapes himself.

Bowman discovered wine in his 30s, before he became a chief. “Most of the guys I worked with in the firehouse were beer drinkers,” he said. But when he met movers and shakers over dinners at fancier restaurants, the wines he sampled opened his mind, and his palate.

“You start to realize wine is very interesting. It’s a whole world,” he said.

Producing his own boutique wine label is the “dream after the career,” Bowman, 61, said in a recent interview, a glass of his 2011 red blend in hand.

Bowman and his wife, Denise, bought a 2½-acre lot near Escondido. Across its west-facing incline, they draped 1,000 malbec and cabernet franc vines. To make the wine, they enlisted Mick Dragoo, an experienced vintner who works with grape growers from Alexander Valley down to Baja California. Dragoo’s business, Escondido’s Belle Marie Winery, happened to be two miles away.

After a few years of experiments, the trio produced their first commercial vintage in 2010, a blend made with half of each grape. They called it Screaming Chief. The name is in part a playful riff on Screaming Eagle (the cult Napa wine), but mostly it’s a nod to Bowman’s past life as chief for three Southern California firefighting agencies.

At first, he wanted to go in a different direction with the branding. “I’m moving on,” he thought. No flames, no hoses or Dalmatians in the logo or lingo.

Grapes, manual labor, those long summer hours “when I’m out there sweating in the dirt,” as he put it, were the perfect antidote to his decades working as a chief — pushing papers and picking battles.

“At the level I was at, it was politics, budgets, personnel problems, and all the things that I didn’t sign up to be a firefighter to do,” he said. He wanted to get as far away from that as possible.

Eventually, the name grew on him. Especially the “screaming” part, since Bowman was known for being something of a loudmouth.

He brought up a city council meeting in 2003, where he announced his department was perilously underfunded. He was advised to keep quiet in that public setting, but he spoke up anyway. Six months later, the Cedar fire hit.

People asked him later if he was clairvoyant. “I said, ‘it’s not ’cause I’m smart. It’s ’cause it’s obvious.’ ”

The small-production wine is getting big praise from local sommeliers. In 2011, the trio made just under 200 cases, and that year’s blend is available at steakhouses and fine restaurants around the county, including Donovan’s and Island Prime.

“It’s one of the best wines I’ve tasted in the area,” said Steven Flowers, owner of Dolce Pane e Vino, which also offers it. “It’s got a great tannin profile, and the fruit is very well balanced. For something from Southern California, that’s kind of hard to find in a wine, and I think Jeff nailed it.”